A friend in need.

“You look like you feel like shit.”

Hank has a wonderful gift of pointing out the obvious.

“Thanks, asshole.”

“No problem. Now, why so glum, chum? I haven’t seen you this shitty since you quit drinking.”

Since Hank actually lives inside my head, you would think he would cut through the inanity of conventional conversations but I think it is all a part of his strange process. He thinks he is helping me. Nursing me through this ridiculous breakdown.

Time will tell.

“Bad Egg is dead.”

“I know, buddy.” He brushes the graying hair out of his eyes and pours himself a slow drink. He turns and sad-eyes me for a long moment. “I know.”

My imaginary companion kills that drink and pours another before walking out on the aft deck with it. He expects me to follow and I will, eventually.

I despise being alone.

As history will show, I will surround myself with people sometimes even if I hate them just to keep the silence from crushing me. The silence breeds the voices, the stories, and the words. I have lived with the words crashing into me for years. The drugs held them back for a while but eventually just fueled the fire even more.

The words come faster than I can type. Faster than I can speak. The memories and emotions and snapshots of a life well wasted. A life lived in excess. Add to that an overactive imagination and a passion for mental sadomasochism and you have one fucked up human being. How do you hold a normal conversation when you are imagining the speaker wearing disco satin and roller skates and there is an actual soundtrack of 70’s soul playing over skating rink speakers and a god damned strobe light flashing somewhere?

I just came to pay the cable bill…

I follow Hank out into the sunshine with a glass of hot tea. Ice is a luxury when you live on a boat. I have a solar panel which gives me enough juice for the laptop and some lights at night but the generator runs on gas which is expensive and a hassle to row back and forth from town. I would just as soon drink my tea warm.

It is one less thing to deal with.

“It has been a hell of a year, hasn't it?”

He stares out at the closet neighbors’ boat. It is actually 3 boats lashed together, two small sailboats and some homemade mishmash bullshit that looks like Frankenstein water sealed it with his big clumsy hands. It is an ugly thing and it pisses me off for some reason. I can’t help it. I would sink it if I thought I could get away with it.

“Yes, it has.”

This past year actually began a long time ago with the realization that I would never be able to work like I used to. My body is nearly crippled from years of abuse and injury. I have been shot twice, stabbed 3 times, and ran over by a couple of cars. I have fallen from a cliff, overdosed a few times, been in more fights than I can remember, and once dropped a Foosball table on my foot while having sex with 2 thick mountain girls in Wyoming. I have broken nearly every bone in my body at least once. I have treated my temple like a honkytonk and I pay for it every day.

The drugs and booze began as recreation and graduated to necessity. It helped to numb the physical and obliterate the emotional. The emotional is the hardest to kill.

You cannot live my life without carrying more than your fair share of scars.

So this year began a few years ago. This year I gave up drugs and alcohol. My life had burst all over the pavement after my mother died. It was already completely insane but I lost my shit when she went away. She would have loved the fact that I pulled myself from underneath my Lost Weekend but she didn't live long enough to witness that.

Long, long nights of sweating, crying, pleading, shitting, and puking, purging the last 30 years from my body, begging God to end my life and She did nearly call my bluff a couple of times. I would never wish that time of my life on anyone.

       I spent a good portion of the last year locked out here on the boat, by myself, talking to Hank. Sam and Moon live here but I have become such a stranger to my own reality that they almost seem like peripherals. They are there, but only out of the corner of my eye.

       But when I try to see them, fully, they disappear like the forgotten words of a song you have sung a thousand times. Sometimes, I wonder if they even see me anymore or am I just a smoldering cigarette abandoned in an ashtray no one has the heart to throw out?

        Sam speaks to me sometimes. I watch her mouth move and I hear sounds and my mouth responds with something else but I have no idea what. The motions are second nature when you have been going through them as long as I have. 

         She holds my clammy hands and whispers to me and I smell her vanilla skin and sometimes I cry for no reason. She crushes me against her at those times and all I can think is that I wish I was man enough to be her comfort when she needed me. Instead, I wallow in myself and grow more silent and antisocial every day.

          So, Mom dies, I quit the Life and go insane, everything has changed, and now Bad Egg is dead.

          “You are going to tell them about him?”

          “I suppose I will have to. Otherwise they won’t understand.”

          “They won’t understand no matter what you say. They didn't know him.”

          I will have to think about this one for a minute…

And so it begins.

“You can’t write that shit.” Hank mumbled over my shoulder. “And you know it.”

 “I just did.” I replied, lighting another cigarette.

 “They will think you have gone soft.” He reaches around and takes my cigarette from my mouth and smokes it himself.

 “I really don’t give a shit what “they” think.” I light another.

 “Yes, you do.”

 “The fuck-all I do! I am so sick of writing the same old shit just because it is expected. Drug dealers and midgets and blood and psychotic rednecks! I even try to write sensitive poetry, from the bloody heart of me and all “they” can say is, Where are the whores? Where is the drunken Zen master and the rock band strung out on heroin? I am sick of it. Sick of the dregs and the flotsam of society living in my head.”

 “Maybe you should find a better class of friends.” Hank mumbled, heading toward the ladder that would carry him to the lower deck. “Write what you want, hot shot. You are going to anyway. I am just telling you that no one is going to want to read that bullshit. It is too real, too visceral, and way too, ummm, gay. No one wants to hear your personal thoughts and feelings.” He turns and begins climbing down.
“If “they” want whores, give them whores. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, my Granddaddy used to say.”

 “Fuck “them” and their whores!” I yell.

 “That’s the spirit of obscene indignation! Now use that! Write it down!”

 “I hate you.” I mumble.

 “I hate you too, jackass. You want a sandwich while I’m down here?”

 “Peanut butter and onion.”

 “You are a strange man, boss.”


 I live on a houseboat in the Florida Keys. I am a recovering alcoholic, a writer, and I have an imaginary companion named Hank whom I talk to when no one else is around. I refrain from calling Hank my imaginary “friend” the same way I refrain from saying “recovering” alcoholic. How exactly do you “recover” from allowing yourself to become such a little bitch over an inanimate object? How do you call someone you cannot stand and does not, technically, exist, a “friend”?

Let’s just say he has been around a while and shows no signs of leaving.

 And maybe inanimate is not the correct word either.

 Anyway, I live on a boat in Paradise and I talk to myself and make a living selling articles to websites and small printers. Most are tiny magazines read only by granola hipsters in skinny jeans who chew on my bits of stoned wisdom while chewing biscotti made with free-range almonds. There is one bookstore in Asheville, NC who pays me for short articles about obscure musicians for their hipster chapbooks that they print themselves in some magical backroom somewhere.

 I had some fun with them a while back when I wrote a review for a jazz/blues duet that did not exist. It described the pair in such a mysterious glow that the buzz around them nearly turned into a frenzy. People claiming to have seen the musicians play live were trying to describe the etherealness of the crunchy grooves to those who were honest enough to admit they had never heard of “Kerouac’s Footstool”. The denial of the local club where they were reported to be playing the coming weekend only led to the mystique surrounding the elusive geniuses of jazz.

 Saturday night at the Orange Peel and 300 people were standing outside the front doors waiting to buy tickets. In order to save face, the manager had only the option of telling the indignant crowd that the band had cancelled because too many people knew about the show and they had expected a much more intimate venue. The result was that the owner sold a bunch of tickets to the Ben Prestage show, which was the already scheduled act. The remainder of the crowd turned on themselves, blaming each other for being the big mouth that ruined everything. Three fights broke out and the publicity was so spectacular that the Orange Peel doubled their advertising dollar on the tiny magazine.


 I paid 2000 dollars for this rusty piece of shit. It leaks everywhere but I figure even if it sinks, it sits in such shallow water that I can just move everything upstairs and live up here. The 9 foot dinghy I use to get back and forth to shore is dirty and rust stained plastic. It has a trolling motor but I never use it. I am not a big fan of mechanical objects. They always break on me and I never cared enough to learn to fix them.

 The same with this boat. It will probably sink to the bottom before I get around to fixing it.

 I live out here with my wife, Sam and her teenage son, Moon, an ugly dog named Lulu, a calico cat named Mango, and Hank. The houseboat is huge and we have plenty of room to move about. Especially when one of us takes up no space at all.

 Hank moved in after I gave up drugs a couple of years back. He just materialized one day like he had always been there and said, “What have you got to drink around here? Oh, and you suck, by the way.”

 For some reason I was never startled or surprised when he showed up. Even though I live a good quarter mile offshore and I did not know this old man.

 “Why do I have to suck?”

 “Because you were much more fun when you were high all the time. You are kind of a stick in the ass now.”

 “Fuck you very much.”